Alipay Implements FIDO For Secure Payments

Secure mobile payments are at the front of conversation this month, with Apple Pay ready to launch tomorrow and mCommerce having a strong presence in Tampa this week at both Biometrics UnPlugged and the Global Identity Summit. At both events, Brett McDowell, executive director of the FIDO Alliance, was a panel member during sessions related to next generation payment security, and he has recently commented on a new step towards a passwordless world of online transactions

Alipay, the mobile wallet solution from Alibaba that boasts over 100 million subscribers, will be implementing secure consumer payments based on FIDO specifications. The announcement came yesterday from Nok Nok Labs, a founding member of FIDO that counts Alipay as a customer.

According to the press release announcement, Alipay has deployed Nok Nok Labs’ Multifactor Authentication Server (MFAS). The MFAS, which provides a unified authentication infrastructure, will allow Alipay to leverage the fingerprint sensor on the Samsung Galaxy S5 for payments. The post-password payment solution is similar to the PayPal biometric transaction functionality on the Galaxy S5.

On the news of Alipay’s FIDO implementation, McDowell wrote on the Alliance’s website:

“With Samsung’s implementations of Synaptics fingerprint sensors in the Samsung Galaxy S5, the S5 mini and the Galaxy Tab, there are many opportunities right now for consumers to use FIDO authentication when Relying Parties (RPs), like Alipay and PayPal, leverage a landscape of hundreds of millions of FIDO Ready user devices.”

This is the second time in three weeks that Alipay has made the news in terms of mobile biometric payments. In the first week of September, Mobile ID World reported on Alipay’s compatibility with the fingerprint sensor on Huawei’s newest flagship smartphone, the Ascend Mate 7.